Trying Hard Is Dangerous and Makes You Sick

Join Karen as she rants for awhile and then lies down for a spell

This week I’m thinking about hustling and how much it entirely sucks.

I’ve never been much of a hustler and have almost always erred on the side of “good enough.” I once worked for a very glossy and strained startup [it was a mutual disaster, obviously, and the start up appears to be a success now while I am…not, so keep that in mind I guess] and my boss once described the workplace culture as “work hard, play hard” so proudly and brightly, as if he’d come up with that concept himself. I went home that night and told my boyfriend Dave about it and he laughed and said my personal culture was “work a little, take a nap.” He’s right! I know a lot of this comes from privilege — despite being a slacker, I went to very good schools where slacking is rare and therefore benefit from those associations and I’m white and I test and interview well and had little trouble finding jobs when I was younger which continues to help me out now. I don’t have kids or other caretaking responsibilities beyond my ancient cat (for now) and I’m relatively healthy (for now) and live in a state with public health insurance options that allowed me to quit my traditional job in 2019 and freelance with varying degrees of success since then. That gives me leeway that others don’t have.

Um, yeah?

HOWEVER…a lot of people I know are either natural born hustlers or have taken up hustling/grinding/working hard as a means to an end. It’s certainly what’s expected of us, particularly in the United States, home of pulling up via your bootstraps, the power of positive thinking, rugged individualism, and all that absolute garbage. Just this week this typical billionaire asshole told fellow attendees at the Saudi Arabian “Davos In The Desert” investment conference that remote workers “didn’t work as hard, regardless of what they tell you” and dared to want to continue to work at home in part because it saves money on hideous, uncomfortable work clothes, exorbitant, soul crushing work lunches, and time and will to live sucking commutes. [Adjectives mine, obviously.] Of course, as Patrick W. Wilson pointed out, “It's not about remote vs office. People have figured out that “grinding” rarely earns them anything extra, no matter where they work. So no reason to do it.”

On the same subject, I’m really enjoying this season of Jane Marie’s podcast The Dream, which focuses on the world of gurus and life coaches. The most recent episode, “Striving Is Bad For Your Health,” has fascinating and enlightening interviews. The first is with epidemiologist Dr. Sherman A. James on the history of the story of John Henry, which I remember fixating on as a very small child thanks to the Ezra Jack Keats picture book as well as this extremely dated and silly production, American Tall Tales Heroes. Pretty messed up that what was probably my first exposure to a Black hero involved the story of someone who was so good at driving steel that he beat a new-fangled steam drill at it during a…public contest?! and then…died with a hammer in his hand?! The hell?!

James also discusses his discovery of what he termed “John Henryism,” the hypothesis of which is “African Americans sometimes attempted to control their environment through similar attempts at superhuman performance, which may involve working harder at the office or working longer hours to prove one's worth.” He did a study in 1983 and of course its complicated, but results pointed to “a very strong correlation between scoring high on the John Henryism scale and having hypertension and all of its attendant problems like stroke and heart attack. The more these men strove for excellence, the sicker they became and the shorter they lived. And contrary to what doctor James and his colleagues speculated, the link was there even for those who had already moved up the socioeconomic ladder, who had achieved success in stability and were aiming to achieve even more.” As he said in his interview with Jane Marie, “successful upward mobility in America for people of color, not just Black Americans, but for people of color comes with a price.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Arline Geronimus started studying health inequity in the 1970s at a school for pregnant and parenting teenagers. She came up with the concept of “weathering…which which was the idea that if you're part of a denigrated group, you're both exposed to more assaults that wear down your health at earlier ages, and so that's weathering, as in a rock being you know, weathered by wind and rain over centuries.” Geronimus tells Jane Marie, “there's just this endless coping…I might call it psychosocial. [Stress is] not just this individual thing you can manage or control….{A] very big part of what sets off all those stress reactions in your body… is that we all as human beings need to have a sense of how safe we are in any particular situation. And safe can mean, literally, life or death safe, or it can mean ‘Are we somewhere where we can be authentic, where we will be treated fairly?’ So we set off these stress reactions that people kind of vernacularly know as fight or flight. But if you think about what happens when you set them off, you start to see how your health wears down early along the very things that cause the health inequities by race and class in the United States.”

There is obviously a massive range of types and degrees of coping in place and all sorts of intersectional categorizations and experiences that are constantly at work in addition to the coping, and but everyone I know is doing some degree of “endless coping” right now. It is a terrifying and disheartening time to be a person in the world and it’s exhausting and, yes, stressful. Please don’t add any unnecessary “grinding” on top of everything else and please join me in spreading the word that good enough is, 99 percent of the time, enough. Take it as easy as you can on yourself and other people and stand up to the very attitudes and expectations that want to steal our safety and comfort. Per Jane Marie, “When entire enormous communities suffer in an effort to not suffer, we all suffer.”

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